43,000 Ukrainian Troops Dead, 370,000 Injured Since 2022 – Zelensky

[UPDATES] Zelensky previously said Ukraine lost 31,000 troops in a February statement without disclosing the number of wounded, nor whether the number encompassed the casualties from 2014. The text has been edited to reflect the previous statements.

Ukraine lost 43,000 troops with a further 370,000 wounded since Russia launched its invasion in 2022, President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Sunday. 

He said the wounded figures included injuries of all kinds, and that roughly half of those wounded have returned to service. 

Zelensky’s Sunday Telegram announcement, which came after his meeting with US President-elect Donald Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris, marked the first official tally released by Kyiv that detailed the number of killed and wounded since 2022. 

“Since the beginning of the full-scale war, Ukraine has lost 43,000 soldiers who died on the battlefield. 370,000 cases of providing assistance to the wounded, and this is taking into account that in our army approximately 50% of the wounded return to service, and all injuries are recorded, including minor and repeated ones,” read Zelensky’s announcement. 

Zelensky also said Russian troop casualties “[exceeded] 750,000” as of Sunday, Dec. 8, including 198,000 dead and more than 550,000 wounded. 

Ukraine estimated on Sunday that Russia’s troop casualty stood at 753,370. 

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“Since September of this year, Russia has been losing people on the battlefield in a ratio of 5 and even 6 to 1 for us,” Zelensky added. 

Zelensky’s estimation of Ukrainian troop losses is less than what Western media speculated earlier. 

On Nov. 27, The Economist estimated that “at least 60,000-100,000 Ukrainian soldiers have died so far” using leaked or published reports by intelligence agencies, defense officials, researchers and open-source intelligence. 

However, the publication noted that the reports “are difficult to verify independently.”

The Economist’s estimation of Russian casualties, as of June 21, stood at 106,000-140,000 dead, which largely corroborated with Ukrainian estimations. 

In July, the commander of Chechnya’s Akhmat special forces, Major General Apty Alaudinov, claimed on a Russian talk show that Ukraine lost 700,000 troops since 2022 without providing the means of estimations.